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lomonaaerenTitle: The Art of the Impossible
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco/Blaise/Theo
Content Notes: AU (Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived), discussions of past torture and character deaths, references to child abuse, corruption arc, violence, gore, emotional manipulation, magical bonding, polyamory
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 6100
Summary: AU. Neville Longbottom, the Boy-Who-Lived, won the war against Voldemort, and Harry Potter played his small part in that victory. Now, less than five years later, a group of disaffected former Death Eaters is causing trouble, and asking for Harry as a hostage in return for a period of peace. Harry, believing it’s better he be taken prisoner than Neville, accepts, thinking this will give Neville time to gather his forces and put down the Death Eaters. He doesn’t much think about his own fate, other than to assume it will be gruesome. He’s wrong.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” chaptered fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This will probably have five to six chapters, and is a fairly dark fic. The title is a play on the description of politics as “the art of the possible.”
The Art of the Impossible
“Are you ready, Harry?”
Hermione was avoiding his eyes as she opened the door of the small room in the Ministry where Harry had been waiting. Harry stood and took a step forwards. “Hey.”
Hermione looked up at him, so absolutely miserable that Harry reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing once. “It’ll be all right,” he whispered. “You’ll settle this one way or the other, and we can go on working to free house-elves.”
Hermione gave a watery sniffle and then flung her arms around him. Harry hugged back, touched. They weren’t close friends, not the way Ron and Hermione and Neville were in their tight little group. But they’d spent time enough together during the war and after that Hermione evidently thought he deserved a hug.
“It’s so brave of you to do this,” Hermione whispered against his collarbone.
“Not brave, just necessary.” Harry smiled to cheer her when she looked up at him. “What’s that saying, never get in the way of your enemy making a mistake? And they have.”
“It is odd that they asked for you instead of me or Neville or Ron or even Ginny.”
Harry nodded, glad that Hermione was back to an almost normal tone. “About the most prominent thing I did was cut off Nagini’s head. I’m not the Boy-Who-Lived or his one true love or one of his genius best friends.”
Hermione laughed again, a little better this time. “I don’t know that Ron is used to being called a genius.”
“He is, though. With chess and strategy.” Harry didn’t know that much about the quest that Neville and Ron and Hermione had taken off on, what they’d had to hunt down to get rid of Voldemort. Weapons or something like that. But he knew that Ron’s strategy had probably played a part.
Hermione fiddled with her robes for a moment, then took a deep breath. “I suppose nothing is gained by putting it off.”
“Nothing,” Harry confirmed, and followed her out of the cell, which just contained a table and a chair and a cot and a loo, and down the corridor. Their footsteps echoed back from the quiet, blank grey stone walls in this part of the Ministry.
*
They stepped out into the Ministry Atrium. There was a statue in the middle of a wizard and witch shaking hands with a goblin and a centaur. No house-elves in an equal position, Harry thought. But he supposed that was better than the prior statue that had shown a house-elf cowering in adoration.
Then he shook his head. He probably didn’t need to wonder or worry about that anymore. It wasn’t like the Death Eaters would let him continue his research and legislation in support of house-elf freedom.
They would probably torture him to death, Harry thought, as calmly as he could. Or kill him when the year was up. He didn’t know which fate was more likely. He supposed they might have him make some public appearances to discourage Neville’s side from rebelling.
It didn’t matter. They had still made a mistake by asking for someone so relatively low-ranking and unpopular in the hierarchy of war heroes.
Harry fixed his gaze forwards and walked towards the delegation on the other side of the fountain. It was the three former Slytherin students who had bargained to take him hostage. Harry didn’t know for sure if they were among the leaders of the group calling themselves Holly and Yew, or if they were a front for the real leaders to hide behind.
Again, it didn’t matter.
Theodore Nott studied Harry with glittering grey eyes. He had black hair brushed back in what looked like a style so strict Harry was sort of surprised it didn’t hurt, and dark blue robes with silver embroidery. The left sleeve was shorter than the right, probably to show off his Dark Mark. Harry knew Nott was cruel; he had tortured students at the school in their first seventh year in response to the Carrows’ command.
Draco Malfoy stood in the center, flanked by the other two. He had a smirk on his face that Harry had seen a lot. Mostly, Malfoy taunted Ron and Neville, but Harry had jumped in sometimes to take the pressure off.
Malfoy wore pale robes and his shoulder-length white-gold hair loose. His Dark Mark was covered, at least. If the hair and the robes were some kind of fashion statement, Harry had no idea what it was.
On his left was Blaise Zabini, about whom Harry knew the least. He wore red robes, and they were edged with gold thread or maybe charms that made them look like curling flames. He had his arms crossed, and his face was hard and cold.
Well, if the rumors are true and he grew up with a mother who’s a murderer, he probably learned to look that way early on, Harry thought.
All three of them stared at him. Harry stared back, lifting his head a little. He would do what he could, as soon as he found out what their plan was, to delay them, or make things difficult for them, or whatever would help Neville.
He might not be the Boy-Who-Lived, or the Boy-Who-Lived’s true friend, or the Boy-Who-Lived’s true love. But he was sure as fuck on the Boy-Who-Lived’s side.
Malfoy said something quietly. Nott shook his head. Zabini was the one who stepped forwards, watching Harry critically. Maybe he thought Harry should be in robes instead of Muggle clothes, but the “treaty” hadn’t said anything about that. Harry gave him a bright smile.
Zabini said, “You come as agreed?”
“Yes.” It was the hardest thing Harry had done since the war, but he nodded to Hermione. She sighed a little and held out his wand. Zabini took it and examined it with a thin smile, then tucked it away in a holster at his side.
Harry wondered if he would ever see it again.
“Extend your hands, please,” Zabini said, and took a glittering silver pair of cuffs from his robe pocket.
Please? Who does he think he’s fooling with this politeness? Harry thought, barely keeping his snort internal as he held out his hands.
The cuffs sealed around his wrists, and Harry closed his eyes and winced a little as he felt his magic disappear as if torn from his body. The cuffs would ensure that he couldn’t do spells of any kind until they were removed. Harry stayed as calm as he could while Zabini yanked on the chain between the cuffs, as if to check they were secure, but he couldn’t help opening his eyes and peeking at Malfoy and Nott.
To his surprise, neither of them was sneering at him for his flinch. Malfoy looked neutral, and Nott looked like he always did, a blade ready to cut someone.
Huh. Well, I suppose it was weird of me to expect to understand their plan from looking at them.
“The other terms of the agreement will be adhered to,” Neville said, stepping forwards. His face was stern and proud, and Harry looked at him in admiration. Neville had told him, in confidence, that Harry had been the other possible choice for the Boy-Who-Lived, although he hadn’t said what criteria Voldemort had used to make the decision. They had actually been in the same room when Voldemort broke in and killed all four of their parents and Neville had done whatever he’d done to defeat You-Know-Who.
I never could have done that. I would have broken under the burden long before.
“Of course they will be,” Zabini said in a bored voice, and then he and Neville started going through the terms. Harry did snort aloud this time when he heard the ones about his physical safety. Yeah, that would last until the first time he irritated one of the Death Eaters and they tortured him.
“Something funny, Potter?” Malfoy asked softly.
“Nothing you would find funny,” Harry said, and enjoyed the way that Malfoy’s lips thinned. He grinned obnoxiously at him, and Malfoy turned away with a little jerk and joined Zabini in going over the negotiation terms.
“You’re standing there more passively than I thought you would be.”
That was Nott, his voice lowered and his eyes intense as he stared at Harry, as if he thought Harry would break underneath a simple look. Even knowing that someone hard to break was probably what the Death Eaters wanted, Harry looked back with his lip curled. Nott stared at him with a wrinkled brow.
“I’m a prisoner. The treaty is contingent on my good behavior, right?”
“Not exactly that,” Nott began.
“The terms don’t matter that much to the hostages.” Harry rattled the chain between his cuffs to emphasize his point. “The only thing that matters is that I am one.” And the worst choice you could have made if you actually wanted to hamper Neville’s ability to fight back, but I won’t say that.
Nott frowned harder. “You didn’t study the treaty terms?”
“I know it’s for one year. I know I’m a hostage. I know that you swore you wouldn’t attack Neville’s forces and he swore he wouldn’t attack yours, unless you killed me or I killed someone who belongs to you. Don’t worry. I have no intention of doing that. And I don’t see what else I need to know.”
Nott broke away from Harry with a disturbed expression and went to whisper to Malfoy, who moved away from the group with Zabini in it to listen. Then they both turned and stared at Harry.
Harry gave them a bright, edged smile. They could torture him, and probably make him scream before the end—Harry had been under the Cruciatus when the Carrows held the school, and he had screamed—but they couldn’t make him care.
Zabini finished discussing the terms with Neville and turned away with a nod. “Come, Potter,” he said. “We should get you to your new home.” He took Harry’s elbow with gentle fingers that felt hotter than they should.
Harry shrugged off Zabini’s hand. He wouldn’t put it past the man to have cast a spell on his hand that would burn Harry if Harry let it stay there too long. “Lead the way.”
Zabini gave him the twin of Nott’s frown. Harry shrugged, glanced back once to wave at a determined-looking Neville and a Hermione who had tears in her eyes, and faced forwards again.
I’m not as important as they are, but I can do my part.
*
“These are your rooms for the present, Potter,” Malfoy said as he loosened the chain and the cuffs fell free.
Harry looked around the large room in front of him and for once could find nothing to say. The bed in the center was bigger than the one he’d had in Gryffindor Tower, and covered with shimmering blue silk sheets. The curtains around the bed and on the window were blue, too. The window was probably charmed Unbreakable, but given that Harry hadn’t expected to be given a window, at all, that was still something.
He noticed a door off to the side that probably led to the bathroom, a desk with a comfortable chair in front of it that backed up to the window, and shelves crowded with books. Harry snorted a little. “I’m not Hermione, you know.”
“Granger? No, of course not. And thank Merlin for that.” Malfoy stepped in front of Harry, sneering.
Part of Harry relaxed. He’d been thrown off-stride by the room and some of the Slytherins’ strange behavior, but this was more like it. “So I won’t be spending all my time reading.”
“There’s still entertainment for you here. And of course you’ll be allowed to fly on the Quidditch pitch, duel, and train.”
Harry blinked, unnerved. Then he shook his head. “The minute I raise a wand against you, you’ll destroy me.”
“I thought you were more skilled than that.”
“No, I mean because I’d hurt you or irritate you and you’d kill me for hurting or irritating a Death Eater.”
Harry was proud of himself for having spotted the trap, but Malfoy’s withering glare was distinctly unimpressed. “What in the world do you think we brought you here for? Didn’t you read any of the treaty’s constraints?”
“I know I’m not allowed to run away or hurt anyone here.”
“Except in the practice of combat magic,” Malfoy quoted, voice flat. He brushed a fussy hand down his cream-colored robes. “Merlin, it’s like living with a savage.”
“Why in the world would you want to teach me combat magic? In case the treaty does come successfully to an end at some point and I get handed back to Neville and my friends, do you think I’d hesitate to use it against you?”
“Interesting that you don’t categorize Longbottom as a friend.”
“Interesting that you aren’t answering my question.”
Malfoy smiled at him. Harry rolled his eyes and turned away to explore the room a little. The window looked out over the Quidditch pitch, he saw, and decided this was probably Malfoy Manor. It was the only place he knew about that belonged to one of the Slytherins and had a private pitch.
Then again, that lack of knowledge he had about Nott and Zabini might be making him prejudiced.
“Dinner is at seven. We’ll send a house-elf to escort you.”
Harry couldn’t help the way he drew his head back and felt his smile thin and disappear. “I’d prefer that you didn’t. Can you just send me a spell that speaks from midair and escorts me? I’d prefer that.”
“What do you have against house-elves?”
“Nothing. I think they should be free, and not enslaved.”
Malfoy’s eyebrows seemed to be trying to climb off his face. “We treat ours well, in case that matters to you.”
“Really? Dobby was one of yours, wasn’t he? Neville told me that once.” Dobby had also died in the war, but at least he’d got to enjoy a few years of freedom first. Harry could only be glad of that.
Malfoy’s face went smooth and blank. Harry crowed internally. He doesn’t like that. Ha. He probably thought I wouldn’t know anything about how Malfoys treat their slaves.
“I will send the spell,” Malfoy said, his voice sharp, and turned and walked out of the room. Harry wasn’t surprised to hear the lock on the door click shut.
And he didn’t care. He had successfully irritated Malfoy, and he had done it in such a way that Malfoy hadn’t hexed him. Harry wasn’t sure whether he should hope that someday Malfoy would snap and kill him so that Neville could go to war all the sooner, or if he should try to hold out so that Neville and the others would have more time to get ready for the war.
It probably didn’t matter. Nott and Malfoy and Zabini might think they could deal with an annoying Gryffindor, but they’d mostly dealt with Neville, who was supernaturally restrained, and with Hermione, who was pretty much the same, and with Ron, who would throw a punch but had never been in close quarters with them for a long time.
Harry would show them how irritating an ordinary Gryffindor could be.
He wandered over to the bookshelves, smiling. He took down a book wrapped in what looked like wrinkled grey leather and flipped through the pages, idly.
His smile disappeared for a long moment as he stared down at a depiction of someone being drawn and quartered. Then he threw his head back and laughed.
They’d given him Dark Arts books? Oh, that was probably part of their plan (or a subsidiary plan, knowing Slytherins). They wanted to corrupt him and maybe make him turn against Neville. Or perhaps they thought they could send him back as a spy.
Chuckling, Harry slotted the book back onto the shelf. They were going to be really disappointed, if they tried that. Harry was too stupid and unsubtle to be a spy.
And even if he had been interested in reading about the Dark Arts, he was too stupid to understand them, too. He might read the books out of desperation some time, he decided. If he annoyed the Death Eaters so much that they left him in his room more often than they let him out of it.
They didn’t understand how he had grown up. To be fair, no one did. Harry had made some friends, sure, but no one as close and tight as Ron and Hermione and Neville were with each other. And no one who would have wanted to hear about stupid Muggles trying to get the better of him.
Harry was already living in a room larger than his cupboard at the Dursleys had ever been, and he had at least the promise of regular meals. Unless they decided to starve him to death—which the treaty probably prevented them from doing—Harry would beat them.
He might still die, he thought, as he wandered back to the bed and flopped in the middle of a cloud-like mattress to take a nap. But he would die with a smile on his face.
*
A buzzing white light appeared in the room and woke Harry up from a brief nap. The bed was actually that comfortable. Harry stood up with a yawn and followed the light down innumerable staircases and through corridors lined with portraits that stared at him and gossiped about him in low voices.
“What a mess your hair is!” a tall woman with Malfoy coloring and a chin that looked like it was trying to cut its way out of her portrait told him.
“You know what they say about the ones with messy hair,” Harry said, grinning at her, and watched in delight as she recoiled.
“Potter, stop taunting the portraits and get in here.”
Harry turned away. The white light had faded, presumably because they’d reached the doors of the dining room. Of course it was doors, as formal as if they were the entrance to a Muggle government building. Harry would have to remember to share that comparison with Malfoy. He’d hate it.
“Couldn’t you have done something with your hair?” were the words Harry heard the moment he walked into the dining hall. Harry thought it deserved that name. It was at least a fourth of the size of the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and the table and chairs and the gleaming lights on the ceiling were made of what seemed to be crystal.
“Does the treaty say anything about brushing my hair?”
Zabini scowled at him from his place at a chair near the head of the crystal table. Malfoy went to the head seat, of course, and Nott was seated on Malfoy’s left. Probably there was some deep significance to the pureblood seating arrangements. Harry would refuse to learn what they were if anyone tried to teach him.
“This will be trying if you care nothing about personal hygiene.”
“Don’t have to,” Harry said cheerfully, and took his chair, a few seats down from Nott. He thought it was kind of silly to use this immense table to seat just four people, and curious, too. He’d thought there would be more Death Eaters living in Malfoy Manor than this. Voldemort had used the Manor as one of his seats during the war.
“Don’t you want to?” Nott asked in a quiet, sliding voice.
“No.”
Nott shook his head and shot Zabini a glance that Harry didn’t understand. Well, he expected not to understand it. He’d never been good at that subtle, Slytherin, silent-conversation stuff. Neville and Ron and Hermione could do it because they knew each other so well, but not him.
Hell, Harry thought he’d done well to figure out the traps with things like raising his wand to a Slytherin and the Dark Arts books as well as he had.
A platter of steaming soup, with mingled, appetizing smells of potatoes and bacon, appeared in front of him. Harry sniffed, and heard his stomach growl. He picked up his spoon and stirred the soup around.
It took a few minutes for Nott and Zabini and Malfoy, who were talking in lowered voices, to notice. Then Malfoy narrowed his eyes and said, “Isn’t my family’s food good enough for you, Potter?”
“Not when it’s probably full of potions. Or poison. And cooked by house-elves.”
Malfoy closed his eyes and said nothing. Zabini said calmly, “Potter, our harming you is explicitly prohibited by the treaty.”
“Unless Neville attacks. Or I annoy you enough. Or you decide that you’d rather go to war and you’ve had as much time as you wanted to align your forces. Or you want me to be a little more quiet and obedient—”
“What do we have to do get you to eat?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said, commiserating a little with Zabini. He seemed to be the least snobbish of the three of them. “I suppose there isn’t really much you could do.”
“We could get you food that we would assure you wasn’t cooked by house-elves,” Zabini offered.
“How do I know you wouldn’t lie? And there aren’t really any guarantees you could make that potions or poison wasn’t in it.” Harry shrugged and stirred his soup some more. It did smell good, but so did the food at Hogwarts, and now that he had been fully involved in house-elf rights for almost five years, Harry couldn’t imagine eating it again. “Oh! That’s another way you could harm me and still keep the treaty intact that I forgot to mention. You could slip some kind of potion into the food that you could argue was for my own good.”
Malfoy narrowed his eyes, while Zabini leaned back in his chair. They seemed to be trading off leadership positions or something, Harry thought. It was creepy as hell. Or maybe he had annoyed Zabini that much, which cheered him up no end. “What have we done to make you distrust us so much, Potter?”
Harry stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” Malfoy’s face was pale, as always, but solemn. Nott was watching Harry intently again, and Zabini had gone back to eating, shaking his head.
“Been Death Eaters, taunted Neville and other Gryffindors, called Hermione racist names, participated in the torture of students during our first seventh year, let Death Eaters into the school, murdered people, taunted me when you were bored enough, taken me prisoner—”
“Some of that happened to other people, not you.”
“Well, unlike some of the Death Eaters sitting in this room, I’m capable of caring about people who aren’t me.”
Nott said nothing, but Malfoy flung his spoon down in his bowl and said to Zabini, “This isn’t working.”
“Not yet,” Zabini said, which Harry supposed referred to their plan to break Harry. “When he gets hungry enough, he’ll eat.”
Harry laughed before he could help himself, and rolled his eyes at the looks he got. They were about the loudness of his laughter, he thought. He was uncouth. Well, they could have solved that problem pretty easily by leaving him free.
“What’s that laughter for, Potter?” Nott sounded almost scientifically interested.
Harry smiled at him. “I have a lot of experience with starvation. If you’re serious about keeping me alive, then you’ll figure that out soon enough. If you aren’t, then I suppose I’ll starve to death. That’ll probably be pretty embarrassing for you. You’d like me to die because of torture, right?”
Malfoy looked plenty ready to torture him, but Nott and Zabini exchanged a disturbed glance. Harry blinked. Torture and murder were requirements of being Death Eaters. Just mentioning this was enough to bother them? “Wow, your lot have become soft since the war.”
Zabini stood up abruptly and walked around the table, putting a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry gave him a suspicious glance. Zabini’s fingers were still hotter than normal. Had he cast the spell that he thought would allow him to burn Harry again? He was weird.
“I think I ought to be the one to explain some things to Potter,” Zabini said brightly, and hauled Harry out of his chair and towards the far door of the dining room. This one was smaller and probably led to a smaller room, too.
Harry shrugged off Zabini’s hand and walked beside him. He glanced back once. Malfoy and Nott were whispering to each other. At least Malfoy looked disgruntled.
I never told him what the doors to the dining room look like, Harry realized ruefully. I’ll have to do that when I come back.
*
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Harry blinked. Zabini had closed the small door behind them, and they were indeed in a smaller room than the dining room, a close one with dark blue walls and furniture. The only spot of other color was the white marble fireplace mantel.
“I don’t know what you mean. I think I’ve been acting perfectly acceptably for someone who’s been taken prisoner and—”
“You didn’t read the treaty at all, did you?”
“I didn’t much see the point,” Harry said, cooling his voice to match Zabini’s exasperated tone. “The only reason you would have asked for me instead of someone more important is as a pretext. You’re not ready for war yet and need some more time to build your forces. Or you want to goad Neville into doing something rash, but not as rash as he would have if you’d taken Ron or Hermione or Ginny. Or, hell, there’s some other Slytherin plan I’m not seeing—”
“The treaty specifically forbids us to do you harm, unless you attack one of us, and then we are to defend ourselves with as little harm as physically possible.”
Harry just raised an eyebrow.
“What, Potter?”
“If that’s all it says, then you’re not bound to honor it with an oath or magic. You can lose your tempers and hurt me, or torture me for some greater gain.”
“You don’t trust us at all, do you?”
Zabini sounded shocked. Harry laughed. ‘Why the fuck would I, Zabini? When have people who imprisoned me ever had my best interests at heart?”
“When were you imprisoned before this?”
Zabini’s voice had gone soft. Harry just shrugged at him. “None of your business.” He didn’t want them to know the details about the Dursleys. They’d taunt him, and Harry might react in a way that harmed Neville.
Luckily, the Carrows made a convenient excuse, and Harry could almost see Zabini making the connection behind his eyes. He nodded slowly. “I see. Well—the treaty will hold. We intend to abide by all its provisions. You can even wield combat spells against us while you’re learning that kind of magic. I’d thought Draco had explained this, but apparently not.”
Harry sighed a little. “I don’t trust you. I never will.”
“Do you know why we asked for you?”
“I told you that I don’t know—”
“It’s because of this,” Zabini interrupted, and pulled up his right sleeve. Harry narrowed his eyes, wondering if Zabini was one of the rare Death Eaters who had been Marked somewhere other than the left forearm.
But instead, Zabini showed Harry the image of a coiling blue snake, wreathed with bands of gold. Harry blinked at it. It looked as though it had been etched on a pane of glass fastened to Zabini’s arm; it seemed to float slightly above his skin, although Harry assumed that was a magical effect.
“I don’t know what that is,” Harry said slowly, eyes flickering from Zabini’s arm to his face.
Zabini lowered his arm and shook his head in what looked like irritation. “I told Theo and Draco that you wouldn’t, but it appeared after that magical accident in second year.”
Harry’s eyes widened a little. He hadn’t thought about that day in a long time.
*
“Get in pairs, all of you!”
Snape, who hated Harry for some reason Harry had never figured out, had positioned Harry opposite Nott. Nott shifted his balance and leveled his wand at Harry. Harry had the uneasy impression that Nott wasn’t going to stick with the Disarming Charm.
Malfoy began before Lockhart could signal them, though, and he certainly didn’t stick with the Disarming Charm.
“Serpensortia!”
The huge black snake that exploded into being from the end of Malfoy’s wand coiled in front of Neville, hissing. Harry watched as Neville’s face went pasty white. Everyone in Gryffindor Tower knew Neville was scared of snakes, after the time that the Weasley twins had pranked him with a trick wand that changed into one and Ron had yelled at his brothers for an hour.
What Harry didn’t understand was why Neville didn’t speak to the snake, when it was so clearly talking.
“Strangers called me here…I want to bite…I want to kill!”
“Stop!” Harry said, loudly and clearly, stepping forwards. “You aren’t to kill anyone! Just back off!”
The snake whipped towards him, and so did the heads of what looked like most of the people in the Great Hall. Harry heard some gasps. He scoffed internally as he kept his eyes locked on the snake. It wasn’t some brave, grand thing to speak to a magical talking serpent. They should have tried it themselves.
The snake lowered itself to the floor and darted its tongue out again and again, as if something was intriguing about Harry’s scent. “Speaker. I will abide by the law you speak. Do you want me to attack?”
Harry frowned harder. He hadn’t known that magical talking snakes would just ignore what you said. “No. Didn’t you hear what I said? I don’t want you to bite anyone.”
“I had to be sure,” the snake said, as it coiled into a tame circle. “I wanted to, but if you say not to—”
The snake was interrupted. At least five other people had aimed their wands at it, and they all cast at once, ignoring the way that Snape and even Lockhart shouted for them to stop.
The spells collided, and Harry found himself staggering back from the center of the collision, one hand clutched to his face. It felt as though someone had bitten him on the tongue. He leaned over and spat out blood.
When he straightened up again, he found that someone had Banished the snake, and everyone was staring at him with furious or frightened eyes. Well, maybe Snape’s had a kind of terrifying amused gleam in them, but it was true of everyone else.
“What?” Harry demanded.
And that was how he learned about Parseltongue, and what it meant to be a Dark wizard who could speak to snakes, as well as the supposed Heir of Slytherin.
*
Harry cleared his throat. “The—snake appeared on your arm when the spells collided and hit the real snake to banish it?” He didn’t remember that Zabini was one of the people who’d cast the spells, but then, he hadn’t paid much attention to Slytherins at that point unless they were right in his face.
Zabini nodded and let his right sleeve fall back over the snake. “One appeared on Draco’s arm as well, and on Theo’s.”
Harry whistled softly. “So what does it mean?”
“We had a lot of time to figure that out. Eventually, we discovered that it was easy for us to cast spells in tandem.” Zabini smiled. It was an odd smile, or so Harry thought, until he figured out that it was sincere, and that was probably why it looked odd. “When we were close enough, we could communicate silently. Feel each other’s emotions. And physical pain. When we’re further apart, I can send thoughts to the others, but they can’t do it with me. Likewise, Theo can sense our physical sensations but neither Draco nor I can do that, and Draco is the only one who can feel emotions.”
“Huh. That still doesn’t explain what you want with me.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
Zabini sighed as if exasperated. Harry grinned. Good. “You were part of the magical accident that created these marks,” he said, gesturing at his arm and the strange snake Harry could no longer see. “We’ve felt as if someone was missing since we began to grow closer and cast spells together more often. We investigated the other people who’d cast spells to banish that snake Draco summoned, but none of them have the marks. You’re a Parselmouth. You’re the only possible choice.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t have any idea why I have Parseltongue. I don’t know much about my parents, though, so maybe one of them was a Parselmouth and hid it.”
“You can make us magically stronger.” Harry started to scoff, but Zabini pushed ahead, eyes burning with an ardor that puzzled Harry. “We figured it out. Three and seven are magical numbers in the greatest number of theories, but so is four. Four elements. Four major directions. And four components of a wizard or witch.” Zabini held up his fingers to count them off. “Mind, emotions, body, and magic.”
“You can already cast spells together. That’s powerful enough.”
Zabini just shook his head. “There’s no limit to the power we want for ourselves.”
“Sure,” Harry said, and his eyes darted to Zabini’s left arm.
Zabini sighed a little. “Draco’s parents forced him to take the Dark Mark, because they were afraid for their lives and of what would happen to Draco if he didn’t. That meant Theo and I had to do the same thing, because we were too close magically to let him suffer alone. The Mark might have severed our bond altogether if there was only one of it.”
“See? You did just fine without me. There’s no Mark on me, and—”
“That scar on your forehead. Where did it come from?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. Some childhood accident, probably. I could have got it when I was a baby, before my parents died, or when I lived with my Muggle relatives.”
“I think it’s a mark. I think it’s from the Dark Lord.”
“Voldemort?” Harry asked, widening his eyes and making his voice as obnoxious as he possibly could.
Zabini hissed and gripped his left arm. “You wouldn’t speak that name if you knew the pain it puts us through.”
Harry wanted to grin and say it again, but the name stuck in his throat. He turned his head away. Annoying the Death Eaters until they killed him or gave up on using him against Neville was one thing. Hurting people was something else.
“Bollocks,” he did say. “You were calling him the Dark Lord long before you took those Marks.”
“That’s what other Slytherins tended to call him,” Zabini said. He sounded a little more relaxed now, which was silly, but Harry only shrugged off the impulse to sympathize or ask if he was feeling better. No, he wasn’t. The echoes of the pain probably still lingered in his arm. “One thing I would ask you is what story people gave you about the scar.”
Harry snorted. “My relatives told me I got it in a car accident where my parents died. When I found out I was a wizard—”
“What?”
Zabini was staring at him and seemed to be evaluating everything from the way Harry stood to the way he lifted his chin to glare back. Harry decided he would do his best to explain patiently. “A car is a Muggle vehicle. It’s sort of like—”
“No—Potter, I lived in Florence with my mother, near the Muggle part of the city. I’m aware of what a car is.” Zabini narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, when you found out you were a wizard? Your relatives told you, surely?”
“My relatives are Muggles who hate magic. No, they didn’t tell me. I didn’t know until I was eleven.”
Zabini opened his mouth, then closed it soundlessly. Then he said, “I need a fucking drink,” and turned around to go back through the small door into the dining room.
Harry perked up. He thought he had found a new way to torment Zabini and the others, by using Muggle expressions and referring to Muggle things. He’d have to work out a way to talk about Dudley and Uncle Vernon and the telly and computer in conversation.
It would be fun.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco/Blaise/Theo
Content Notes: AU (Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived), discussions of past torture and character deaths, references to child abuse, corruption arc, violence, gore, emotional manipulation, magical bonding, polyamory
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 6100
Summary: AU. Neville Longbottom, the Boy-Who-Lived, won the war against Voldemort, and Harry Potter played his small part in that victory. Now, less than five years later, a group of disaffected former Death Eaters is causing trouble, and asking for Harry as a hostage in return for a period of peace. Harry, believing it’s better he be taken prisoner than Neville, accepts, thinking this will give Neville time to gather his forces and put down the Death Eaters. He doesn’t much think about his own fate, other than to assume it will be gruesome. He’s wrong.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” chaptered fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This will probably have five to six chapters, and is a fairly dark fic. The title is a play on the description of politics as “the art of the possible.”
The Art of the Impossible
“Are you ready, Harry?”
Hermione was avoiding his eyes as she opened the door of the small room in the Ministry where Harry had been waiting. Harry stood and took a step forwards. “Hey.”
Hermione looked up at him, so absolutely miserable that Harry reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing once. “It’ll be all right,” he whispered. “You’ll settle this one way or the other, and we can go on working to free house-elves.”
Hermione gave a watery sniffle and then flung her arms around him. Harry hugged back, touched. They weren’t close friends, not the way Ron and Hermione and Neville were in their tight little group. But they’d spent time enough together during the war and after that Hermione evidently thought he deserved a hug.
“It’s so brave of you to do this,” Hermione whispered against his collarbone.
“Not brave, just necessary.” Harry smiled to cheer her when she looked up at him. “What’s that saying, never get in the way of your enemy making a mistake? And they have.”
“It is odd that they asked for you instead of me or Neville or Ron or even Ginny.”
Harry nodded, glad that Hermione was back to an almost normal tone. “About the most prominent thing I did was cut off Nagini’s head. I’m not the Boy-Who-Lived or his one true love or one of his genius best friends.”
Hermione laughed again, a little better this time. “I don’t know that Ron is used to being called a genius.”
“He is, though. With chess and strategy.” Harry didn’t know that much about the quest that Neville and Ron and Hermione had taken off on, what they’d had to hunt down to get rid of Voldemort. Weapons or something like that. But he knew that Ron’s strategy had probably played a part.
Hermione fiddled with her robes for a moment, then took a deep breath. “I suppose nothing is gained by putting it off.”
“Nothing,” Harry confirmed, and followed her out of the cell, which just contained a table and a chair and a cot and a loo, and down the corridor. Their footsteps echoed back from the quiet, blank grey stone walls in this part of the Ministry.
*
They stepped out into the Ministry Atrium. There was a statue in the middle of a wizard and witch shaking hands with a goblin and a centaur. No house-elves in an equal position, Harry thought. But he supposed that was better than the prior statue that had shown a house-elf cowering in adoration.
Then he shook his head. He probably didn’t need to wonder or worry about that anymore. It wasn’t like the Death Eaters would let him continue his research and legislation in support of house-elf freedom.
They would probably torture him to death, Harry thought, as calmly as he could. Or kill him when the year was up. He didn’t know which fate was more likely. He supposed they might have him make some public appearances to discourage Neville’s side from rebelling.
It didn’t matter. They had still made a mistake by asking for someone so relatively low-ranking and unpopular in the hierarchy of war heroes.
Harry fixed his gaze forwards and walked towards the delegation on the other side of the fountain. It was the three former Slytherin students who had bargained to take him hostage. Harry didn’t know for sure if they were among the leaders of the group calling themselves Holly and Yew, or if they were a front for the real leaders to hide behind.
Again, it didn’t matter.
Theodore Nott studied Harry with glittering grey eyes. He had black hair brushed back in what looked like a style so strict Harry was sort of surprised it didn’t hurt, and dark blue robes with silver embroidery. The left sleeve was shorter than the right, probably to show off his Dark Mark. Harry knew Nott was cruel; he had tortured students at the school in their first seventh year in response to the Carrows’ command.
Draco Malfoy stood in the center, flanked by the other two. He had a smirk on his face that Harry had seen a lot. Mostly, Malfoy taunted Ron and Neville, but Harry had jumped in sometimes to take the pressure off.
Malfoy wore pale robes and his shoulder-length white-gold hair loose. His Dark Mark was covered, at least. If the hair and the robes were some kind of fashion statement, Harry had no idea what it was.
On his left was Blaise Zabini, about whom Harry knew the least. He wore red robes, and they were edged with gold thread or maybe charms that made them look like curling flames. He had his arms crossed, and his face was hard and cold.
Well, if the rumors are true and he grew up with a mother who’s a murderer, he probably learned to look that way early on, Harry thought.
All three of them stared at him. Harry stared back, lifting his head a little. He would do what he could, as soon as he found out what their plan was, to delay them, or make things difficult for them, or whatever would help Neville.
He might not be the Boy-Who-Lived, or the Boy-Who-Lived’s true friend, or the Boy-Who-Lived’s true love. But he was sure as fuck on the Boy-Who-Lived’s side.
Malfoy said something quietly. Nott shook his head. Zabini was the one who stepped forwards, watching Harry critically. Maybe he thought Harry should be in robes instead of Muggle clothes, but the “treaty” hadn’t said anything about that. Harry gave him a bright smile.
Zabini said, “You come as agreed?”
“Yes.” It was the hardest thing Harry had done since the war, but he nodded to Hermione. She sighed a little and held out his wand. Zabini took it and examined it with a thin smile, then tucked it away in a holster at his side.
Harry wondered if he would ever see it again.
“Extend your hands, please,” Zabini said, and took a glittering silver pair of cuffs from his robe pocket.
Please? Who does he think he’s fooling with this politeness? Harry thought, barely keeping his snort internal as he held out his hands.
The cuffs sealed around his wrists, and Harry closed his eyes and winced a little as he felt his magic disappear as if torn from his body. The cuffs would ensure that he couldn’t do spells of any kind until they were removed. Harry stayed as calm as he could while Zabini yanked on the chain between the cuffs, as if to check they were secure, but he couldn’t help opening his eyes and peeking at Malfoy and Nott.
To his surprise, neither of them was sneering at him for his flinch. Malfoy looked neutral, and Nott looked like he always did, a blade ready to cut someone.
Huh. Well, I suppose it was weird of me to expect to understand their plan from looking at them.
“The other terms of the agreement will be adhered to,” Neville said, stepping forwards. His face was stern and proud, and Harry looked at him in admiration. Neville had told him, in confidence, that Harry had been the other possible choice for the Boy-Who-Lived, although he hadn’t said what criteria Voldemort had used to make the decision. They had actually been in the same room when Voldemort broke in and killed all four of their parents and Neville had done whatever he’d done to defeat You-Know-Who.
I never could have done that. I would have broken under the burden long before.
“Of course they will be,” Zabini said in a bored voice, and then he and Neville started going through the terms. Harry did snort aloud this time when he heard the ones about his physical safety. Yeah, that would last until the first time he irritated one of the Death Eaters and they tortured him.
“Something funny, Potter?” Malfoy asked softly.
“Nothing you would find funny,” Harry said, and enjoyed the way that Malfoy’s lips thinned. He grinned obnoxiously at him, and Malfoy turned away with a little jerk and joined Zabini in going over the negotiation terms.
“You’re standing there more passively than I thought you would be.”
That was Nott, his voice lowered and his eyes intense as he stared at Harry, as if he thought Harry would break underneath a simple look. Even knowing that someone hard to break was probably what the Death Eaters wanted, Harry looked back with his lip curled. Nott stared at him with a wrinkled brow.
“I’m a prisoner. The treaty is contingent on my good behavior, right?”
“Not exactly that,” Nott began.
“The terms don’t matter that much to the hostages.” Harry rattled the chain between his cuffs to emphasize his point. “The only thing that matters is that I am one.” And the worst choice you could have made if you actually wanted to hamper Neville’s ability to fight back, but I won’t say that.
Nott frowned harder. “You didn’t study the treaty terms?”
“I know it’s for one year. I know I’m a hostage. I know that you swore you wouldn’t attack Neville’s forces and he swore he wouldn’t attack yours, unless you killed me or I killed someone who belongs to you. Don’t worry. I have no intention of doing that. And I don’t see what else I need to know.”
Nott broke away from Harry with a disturbed expression and went to whisper to Malfoy, who moved away from the group with Zabini in it to listen. Then they both turned and stared at Harry.
Harry gave them a bright, edged smile. They could torture him, and probably make him scream before the end—Harry had been under the Cruciatus when the Carrows held the school, and he had screamed—but they couldn’t make him care.
Zabini finished discussing the terms with Neville and turned away with a nod. “Come, Potter,” he said. “We should get you to your new home.” He took Harry’s elbow with gentle fingers that felt hotter than they should.
Harry shrugged off Zabini’s hand. He wouldn’t put it past the man to have cast a spell on his hand that would burn Harry if Harry let it stay there too long. “Lead the way.”
Zabini gave him the twin of Nott’s frown. Harry shrugged, glanced back once to wave at a determined-looking Neville and a Hermione who had tears in her eyes, and faced forwards again.
I’m not as important as they are, but I can do my part.
*
“These are your rooms for the present, Potter,” Malfoy said as he loosened the chain and the cuffs fell free.
Harry looked around the large room in front of him and for once could find nothing to say. The bed in the center was bigger than the one he’d had in Gryffindor Tower, and covered with shimmering blue silk sheets. The curtains around the bed and on the window were blue, too. The window was probably charmed Unbreakable, but given that Harry hadn’t expected to be given a window, at all, that was still something.
He noticed a door off to the side that probably led to the bathroom, a desk with a comfortable chair in front of it that backed up to the window, and shelves crowded with books. Harry snorted a little. “I’m not Hermione, you know.”
“Granger? No, of course not. And thank Merlin for that.” Malfoy stepped in front of Harry, sneering.
Part of Harry relaxed. He’d been thrown off-stride by the room and some of the Slytherins’ strange behavior, but this was more like it. “So I won’t be spending all my time reading.”
“There’s still entertainment for you here. And of course you’ll be allowed to fly on the Quidditch pitch, duel, and train.”
Harry blinked, unnerved. Then he shook his head. “The minute I raise a wand against you, you’ll destroy me.”
“I thought you were more skilled than that.”
“No, I mean because I’d hurt you or irritate you and you’d kill me for hurting or irritating a Death Eater.”
Harry was proud of himself for having spotted the trap, but Malfoy’s withering glare was distinctly unimpressed. “What in the world do you think we brought you here for? Didn’t you read any of the treaty’s constraints?”
“I know I’m not allowed to run away or hurt anyone here.”
“Except in the practice of combat magic,” Malfoy quoted, voice flat. He brushed a fussy hand down his cream-colored robes. “Merlin, it’s like living with a savage.”
“Why in the world would you want to teach me combat magic? In case the treaty does come successfully to an end at some point and I get handed back to Neville and my friends, do you think I’d hesitate to use it against you?”
“Interesting that you don’t categorize Longbottom as a friend.”
“Interesting that you aren’t answering my question.”
Malfoy smiled at him. Harry rolled his eyes and turned away to explore the room a little. The window looked out over the Quidditch pitch, he saw, and decided this was probably Malfoy Manor. It was the only place he knew about that belonged to one of the Slytherins and had a private pitch.
Then again, that lack of knowledge he had about Nott and Zabini might be making him prejudiced.
“Dinner is at seven. We’ll send a house-elf to escort you.”
Harry couldn’t help the way he drew his head back and felt his smile thin and disappear. “I’d prefer that you didn’t. Can you just send me a spell that speaks from midair and escorts me? I’d prefer that.”
“What do you have against house-elves?”
“Nothing. I think they should be free, and not enslaved.”
Malfoy’s eyebrows seemed to be trying to climb off his face. “We treat ours well, in case that matters to you.”
“Really? Dobby was one of yours, wasn’t he? Neville told me that once.” Dobby had also died in the war, but at least he’d got to enjoy a few years of freedom first. Harry could only be glad of that.
Malfoy’s face went smooth and blank. Harry crowed internally. He doesn’t like that. Ha. He probably thought I wouldn’t know anything about how Malfoys treat their slaves.
“I will send the spell,” Malfoy said, his voice sharp, and turned and walked out of the room. Harry wasn’t surprised to hear the lock on the door click shut.
And he didn’t care. He had successfully irritated Malfoy, and he had done it in such a way that Malfoy hadn’t hexed him. Harry wasn’t sure whether he should hope that someday Malfoy would snap and kill him so that Neville could go to war all the sooner, or if he should try to hold out so that Neville and the others would have more time to get ready for the war.
It probably didn’t matter. Nott and Malfoy and Zabini might think they could deal with an annoying Gryffindor, but they’d mostly dealt with Neville, who was supernaturally restrained, and with Hermione, who was pretty much the same, and with Ron, who would throw a punch but had never been in close quarters with them for a long time.
Harry would show them how irritating an ordinary Gryffindor could be.
He wandered over to the bookshelves, smiling. He took down a book wrapped in what looked like wrinkled grey leather and flipped through the pages, idly.
His smile disappeared for a long moment as he stared down at a depiction of someone being drawn and quartered. Then he threw his head back and laughed.
They’d given him Dark Arts books? Oh, that was probably part of their plan (or a subsidiary plan, knowing Slytherins). They wanted to corrupt him and maybe make him turn against Neville. Or perhaps they thought they could send him back as a spy.
Chuckling, Harry slotted the book back onto the shelf. They were going to be really disappointed, if they tried that. Harry was too stupid and unsubtle to be a spy.
And even if he had been interested in reading about the Dark Arts, he was too stupid to understand them, too. He might read the books out of desperation some time, he decided. If he annoyed the Death Eaters so much that they left him in his room more often than they let him out of it.
They didn’t understand how he had grown up. To be fair, no one did. Harry had made some friends, sure, but no one as close and tight as Ron and Hermione and Neville were with each other. And no one who would have wanted to hear about stupid Muggles trying to get the better of him.
Harry was already living in a room larger than his cupboard at the Dursleys had ever been, and he had at least the promise of regular meals. Unless they decided to starve him to death—which the treaty probably prevented them from doing—Harry would beat them.
He might still die, he thought, as he wandered back to the bed and flopped in the middle of a cloud-like mattress to take a nap. But he would die with a smile on his face.
*
A buzzing white light appeared in the room and woke Harry up from a brief nap. The bed was actually that comfortable. Harry stood up with a yawn and followed the light down innumerable staircases and through corridors lined with portraits that stared at him and gossiped about him in low voices.
“What a mess your hair is!” a tall woman with Malfoy coloring and a chin that looked like it was trying to cut its way out of her portrait told him.
“You know what they say about the ones with messy hair,” Harry said, grinning at her, and watched in delight as she recoiled.
“Potter, stop taunting the portraits and get in here.”
Harry turned away. The white light had faded, presumably because they’d reached the doors of the dining room. Of course it was doors, as formal as if they were the entrance to a Muggle government building. Harry would have to remember to share that comparison with Malfoy. He’d hate it.
“Couldn’t you have done something with your hair?” were the words Harry heard the moment he walked into the dining hall. Harry thought it deserved that name. It was at least a fourth of the size of the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and the table and chairs and the gleaming lights on the ceiling were made of what seemed to be crystal.
“Does the treaty say anything about brushing my hair?”
Zabini scowled at him from his place at a chair near the head of the crystal table. Malfoy went to the head seat, of course, and Nott was seated on Malfoy’s left. Probably there was some deep significance to the pureblood seating arrangements. Harry would refuse to learn what they were if anyone tried to teach him.
“This will be trying if you care nothing about personal hygiene.”
“Don’t have to,” Harry said cheerfully, and took his chair, a few seats down from Nott. He thought it was kind of silly to use this immense table to seat just four people, and curious, too. He’d thought there would be more Death Eaters living in Malfoy Manor than this. Voldemort had used the Manor as one of his seats during the war.
“Don’t you want to?” Nott asked in a quiet, sliding voice.
“No.”
Nott shook his head and shot Zabini a glance that Harry didn’t understand. Well, he expected not to understand it. He’d never been good at that subtle, Slytherin, silent-conversation stuff. Neville and Ron and Hermione could do it because they knew each other so well, but not him.
Hell, Harry thought he’d done well to figure out the traps with things like raising his wand to a Slytherin and the Dark Arts books as well as he had.
A platter of steaming soup, with mingled, appetizing smells of potatoes and bacon, appeared in front of him. Harry sniffed, and heard his stomach growl. He picked up his spoon and stirred the soup around.
It took a few minutes for Nott and Zabini and Malfoy, who were talking in lowered voices, to notice. Then Malfoy narrowed his eyes and said, “Isn’t my family’s food good enough for you, Potter?”
“Not when it’s probably full of potions. Or poison. And cooked by house-elves.”
Malfoy closed his eyes and said nothing. Zabini said calmly, “Potter, our harming you is explicitly prohibited by the treaty.”
“Unless Neville attacks. Or I annoy you enough. Or you decide that you’d rather go to war and you’ve had as much time as you wanted to align your forces. Or you want me to be a little more quiet and obedient—”
“What do we have to do get you to eat?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said, commiserating a little with Zabini. He seemed to be the least snobbish of the three of them. “I suppose there isn’t really much you could do.”
“We could get you food that we would assure you wasn’t cooked by house-elves,” Zabini offered.
“How do I know you wouldn’t lie? And there aren’t really any guarantees you could make that potions or poison wasn’t in it.” Harry shrugged and stirred his soup some more. It did smell good, but so did the food at Hogwarts, and now that he had been fully involved in house-elf rights for almost five years, Harry couldn’t imagine eating it again. “Oh! That’s another way you could harm me and still keep the treaty intact that I forgot to mention. You could slip some kind of potion into the food that you could argue was for my own good.”
Malfoy narrowed his eyes, while Zabini leaned back in his chair. They seemed to be trading off leadership positions or something, Harry thought. It was creepy as hell. Or maybe he had annoyed Zabini that much, which cheered him up no end. “What have we done to make you distrust us so much, Potter?”
Harry stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” Malfoy’s face was pale, as always, but solemn. Nott was watching Harry intently again, and Zabini had gone back to eating, shaking his head.
“Been Death Eaters, taunted Neville and other Gryffindors, called Hermione racist names, participated in the torture of students during our first seventh year, let Death Eaters into the school, murdered people, taunted me when you were bored enough, taken me prisoner—”
“Some of that happened to other people, not you.”
“Well, unlike some of the Death Eaters sitting in this room, I’m capable of caring about people who aren’t me.”
Nott said nothing, but Malfoy flung his spoon down in his bowl and said to Zabini, “This isn’t working.”
“Not yet,” Zabini said, which Harry supposed referred to their plan to break Harry. “When he gets hungry enough, he’ll eat.”
Harry laughed before he could help himself, and rolled his eyes at the looks he got. They were about the loudness of his laughter, he thought. He was uncouth. Well, they could have solved that problem pretty easily by leaving him free.
“What’s that laughter for, Potter?” Nott sounded almost scientifically interested.
Harry smiled at him. “I have a lot of experience with starvation. If you’re serious about keeping me alive, then you’ll figure that out soon enough. If you aren’t, then I suppose I’ll starve to death. That’ll probably be pretty embarrassing for you. You’d like me to die because of torture, right?”
Malfoy looked plenty ready to torture him, but Nott and Zabini exchanged a disturbed glance. Harry blinked. Torture and murder were requirements of being Death Eaters. Just mentioning this was enough to bother them? “Wow, your lot have become soft since the war.”
Zabini stood up abruptly and walked around the table, putting a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry gave him a suspicious glance. Zabini’s fingers were still hotter than normal. Had he cast the spell that he thought would allow him to burn Harry again? He was weird.
“I think I ought to be the one to explain some things to Potter,” Zabini said brightly, and hauled Harry out of his chair and towards the far door of the dining room. This one was smaller and probably led to a smaller room, too.
Harry shrugged off Zabini’s hand and walked beside him. He glanced back once. Malfoy and Nott were whispering to each other. At least Malfoy looked disgruntled.
I never told him what the doors to the dining room look like, Harry realized ruefully. I’ll have to do that when I come back.
*
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Harry blinked. Zabini had closed the small door behind them, and they were indeed in a smaller room than the dining room, a close one with dark blue walls and furniture. The only spot of other color was the white marble fireplace mantel.
“I don’t know what you mean. I think I’ve been acting perfectly acceptably for someone who’s been taken prisoner and—”
“You didn’t read the treaty at all, did you?”
“I didn’t much see the point,” Harry said, cooling his voice to match Zabini’s exasperated tone. “The only reason you would have asked for me instead of someone more important is as a pretext. You’re not ready for war yet and need some more time to build your forces. Or you want to goad Neville into doing something rash, but not as rash as he would have if you’d taken Ron or Hermione or Ginny. Or, hell, there’s some other Slytherin plan I’m not seeing—”
“The treaty specifically forbids us to do you harm, unless you attack one of us, and then we are to defend ourselves with as little harm as physically possible.”
Harry just raised an eyebrow.
“What, Potter?”
“If that’s all it says, then you’re not bound to honor it with an oath or magic. You can lose your tempers and hurt me, or torture me for some greater gain.”
“You don’t trust us at all, do you?”
Zabini sounded shocked. Harry laughed. ‘Why the fuck would I, Zabini? When have people who imprisoned me ever had my best interests at heart?”
“When were you imprisoned before this?”
Zabini’s voice had gone soft. Harry just shrugged at him. “None of your business.” He didn’t want them to know the details about the Dursleys. They’d taunt him, and Harry might react in a way that harmed Neville.
Luckily, the Carrows made a convenient excuse, and Harry could almost see Zabini making the connection behind his eyes. He nodded slowly. “I see. Well—the treaty will hold. We intend to abide by all its provisions. You can even wield combat spells against us while you’re learning that kind of magic. I’d thought Draco had explained this, but apparently not.”
Harry sighed a little. “I don’t trust you. I never will.”
“Do you know why we asked for you?”
“I told you that I don’t know—”
“It’s because of this,” Zabini interrupted, and pulled up his right sleeve. Harry narrowed his eyes, wondering if Zabini was one of the rare Death Eaters who had been Marked somewhere other than the left forearm.
But instead, Zabini showed Harry the image of a coiling blue snake, wreathed with bands of gold. Harry blinked at it. It looked as though it had been etched on a pane of glass fastened to Zabini’s arm; it seemed to float slightly above his skin, although Harry assumed that was a magical effect.
“I don’t know what that is,” Harry said slowly, eyes flickering from Zabini’s arm to his face.
Zabini lowered his arm and shook his head in what looked like irritation. “I told Theo and Draco that you wouldn’t, but it appeared after that magical accident in second year.”
Harry’s eyes widened a little. He hadn’t thought about that day in a long time.
*
“Get in pairs, all of you!”
Snape, who hated Harry for some reason Harry had never figured out, had positioned Harry opposite Nott. Nott shifted his balance and leveled his wand at Harry. Harry had the uneasy impression that Nott wasn’t going to stick with the Disarming Charm.
Malfoy began before Lockhart could signal them, though, and he certainly didn’t stick with the Disarming Charm.
“Serpensortia!”
The huge black snake that exploded into being from the end of Malfoy’s wand coiled in front of Neville, hissing. Harry watched as Neville’s face went pasty white. Everyone in Gryffindor Tower knew Neville was scared of snakes, after the time that the Weasley twins had pranked him with a trick wand that changed into one and Ron had yelled at his brothers for an hour.
What Harry didn’t understand was why Neville didn’t speak to the snake, when it was so clearly talking.
“Strangers called me here…I want to bite…I want to kill!”
“Stop!” Harry said, loudly and clearly, stepping forwards. “You aren’t to kill anyone! Just back off!”
The snake whipped towards him, and so did the heads of what looked like most of the people in the Great Hall. Harry heard some gasps. He scoffed internally as he kept his eyes locked on the snake. It wasn’t some brave, grand thing to speak to a magical talking serpent. They should have tried it themselves.
The snake lowered itself to the floor and darted its tongue out again and again, as if something was intriguing about Harry’s scent. “Speaker. I will abide by the law you speak. Do you want me to attack?”
Harry frowned harder. He hadn’t known that magical talking snakes would just ignore what you said. “No. Didn’t you hear what I said? I don’t want you to bite anyone.”
“I had to be sure,” the snake said, as it coiled into a tame circle. “I wanted to, but if you say not to—”
The snake was interrupted. At least five other people had aimed their wands at it, and they all cast at once, ignoring the way that Snape and even Lockhart shouted for them to stop.
The spells collided, and Harry found himself staggering back from the center of the collision, one hand clutched to his face. It felt as though someone had bitten him on the tongue. He leaned over and spat out blood.
When he straightened up again, he found that someone had Banished the snake, and everyone was staring at him with furious or frightened eyes. Well, maybe Snape’s had a kind of terrifying amused gleam in them, but it was true of everyone else.
“What?” Harry demanded.
And that was how he learned about Parseltongue, and what it meant to be a Dark wizard who could speak to snakes, as well as the supposed Heir of Slytherin.
*
Harry cleared his throat. “The—snake appeared on your arm when the spells collided and hit the real snake to banish it?” He didn’t remember that Zabini was one of the people who’d cast the spells, but then, he hadn’t paid much attention to Slytherins at that point unless they were right in his face.
Zabini nodded and let his right sleeve fall back over the snake. “One appeared on Draco’s arm as well, and on Theo’s.”
Harry whistled softly. “So what does it mean?”
“We had a lot of time to figure that out. Eventually, we discovered that it was easy for us to cast spells in tandem.” Zabini smiled. It was an odd smile, or so Harry thought, until he figured out that it was sincere, and that was probably why it looked odd. “When we were close enough, we could communicate silently. Feel each other’s emotions. And physical pain. When we’re further apart, I can send thoughts to the others, but they can’t do it with me. Likewise, Theo can sense our physical sensations but neither Draco nor I can do that, and Draco is the only one who can feel emotions.”
“Huh. That still doesn’t explain what you want with me.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
Zabini sighed as if exasperated. Harry grinned. Good. “You were part of the magical accident that created these marks,” he said, gesturing at his arm and the strange snake Harry could no longer see. “We’ve felt as if someone was missing since we began to grow closer and cast spells together more often. We investigated the other people who’d cast spells to banish that snake Draco summoned, but none of them have the marks. You’re a Parselmouth. You’re the only possible choice.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t have any idea why I have Parseltongue. I don’t know much about my parents, though, so maybe one of them was a Parselmouth and hid it.”
“You can make us magically stronger.” Harry started to scoff, but Zabini pushed ahead, eyes burning with an ardor that puzzled Harry. “We figured it out. Three and seven are magical numbers in the greatest number of theories, but so is four. Four elements. Four major directions. And four components of a wizard or witch.” Zabini held up his fingers to count them off. “Mind, emotions, body, and magic.”
“You can already cast spells together. That’s powerful enough.”
Zabini just shook his head. “There’s no limit to the power we want for ourselves.”
“Sure,” Harry said, and his eyes darted to Zabini’s left arm.
Zabini sighed a little. “Draco’s parents forced him to take the Dark Mark, because they were afraid for their lives and of what would happen to Draco if he didn’t. That meant Theo and I had to do the same thing, because we were too close magically to let him suffer alone. The Mark might have severed our bond altogether if there was only one of it.”
“See? You did just fine without me. There’s no Mark on me, and—”
“That scar on your forehead. Where did it come from?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. Some childhood accident, probably. I could have got it when I was a baby, before my parents died, or when I lived with my Muggle relatives.”
“I think it’s a mark. I think it’s from the Dark Lord.”
“Voldemort?” Harry asked, widening his eyes and making his voice as obnoxious as he possibly could.
Zabini hissed and gripped his left arm. “You wouldn’t speak that name if you knew the pain it puts us through.”
Harry wanted to grin and say it again, but the name stuck in his throat. He turned his head away. Annoying the Death Eaters until they killed him or gave up on using him against Neville was one thing. Hurting people was something else.
“Bollocks,” he did say. “You were calling him the Dark Lord long before you took those Marks.”
“That’s what other Slytherins tended to call him,” Zabini said. He sounded a little more relaxed now, which was silly, but Harry only shrugged off the impulse to sympathize or ask if he was feeling better. No, he wasn’t. The echoes of the pain probably still lingered in his arm. “One thing I would ask you is what story people gave you about the scar.”
Harry snorted. “My relatives told me I got it in a car accident where my parents died. When I found out I was a wizard—”
“What?”
Zabini was staring at him and seemed to be evaluating everything from the way Harry stood to the way he lifted his chin to glare back. Harry decided he would do his best to explain patiently. “A car is a Muggle vehicle. It’s sort of like—”
“No—Potter, I lived in Florence with my mother, near the Muggle part of the city. I’m aware of what a car is.” Zabini narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, when you found out you were a wizard? Your relatives told you, surely?”
“My relatives are Muggles who hate magic. No, they didn’t tell me. I didn’t know until I was eleven.”
Zabini opened his mouth, then closed it soundlessly. Then he said, “I need a fucking drink,” and turned around to go back through the small door into the dining room.
Harry perked up. He thought he had found a new way to torment Zabini and the others, by using Muggle expressions and referring to Muggle things. He’d have to work out a way to talk about Dudley and Uncle Vernon and the telly and computer in conversation.
It would be fun.
